Clark County food drive nets nearly 269,000 pounds

Roxie Olsen chairs the massive annual Clark County Walk and Knock food drive. "I think the community as a whole are striving to give more of themselves," she said last Saturday at the Clark County Food Bank warehouse.
Peter Beland/Special To The Oregonian

Two of Walk and Knock's 3,500 volunteers got out of the car and unloaded grocery bags they'd gathered at a neighborhood donation site. The bags went onto a wooden pallet replete with foodstuffs destined for the 33,000 people who receive food boxes each month in Clark county.

One neighborhood down, 10,000 pounds more to come in the next few days.

"They have a heart of giving and it is a season of giving -- to do as much for others as for yourself," Olsen says of community members.

In its 27th year of operation, Walk and Knock is Clark County's largest annual food drive, occurring on the first Saturday of every December. This year, food need is up 5 percent in Clark County over the food bank's previous fiscal year, says the food bank's operations manager, James Fitzgerald, The number of food boxes needed every month has increased by 2,000 compared to five years ago, Fitzgerald says.

This year marks the second time Walk and Knock was run through a Clark County Food Bank storage facility that was expanded a year ago. With the additional storage -- including a 6,400-cubic-foot cooler and a similarly sized freezer -- Clark County Food Bank can distribute the nearly 269,000 pounds of food gathered from Walk and Knock more evenly over the next year.

"It allows us to get (food) to the 19 agencies in a more timely manner," says the food bank's executive director, Alan Hamilton, referring to the food bank's 19 partner pantries that help distribute 10,000 food boxes a month to needy Clark County families. "If it gets into their system, most of the county's pantries don't have sufficient storage."

And with demand for food steady year-round, insufficient storage would mean that "there would be glut and it would not be preserved," Hamilton says.

The Clark County Food Bank houses food from large and small food drives throughout the year. "In the first eight months of 2012, we received 600,000 pounds of food" -- roughly equivalent to $900,000 worth of goods -- "that in previous years would have been rejected due to insufficient space," says Hamilton.

And this past summer and fall, the food bank worked with local farmers to get 125,000 pounds of fresh produce, which it processed and stored in its newly enlarged facility.

On Saturday, Walk and Knock volunteers and food bank staff played musical chairs as they moved around existing food in anticipation of the influx of donations from community members.

"We had to plan on what sections we can block off for awhile," says Fitzgerald. "It did slow down the shipments going in."

But durable goods such as those donated during Walk and Knock form the core of the food boxes given out every month. "One of the things that is significant about that is that it is shelf-stable food," says Hamilton.